1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a system and method for testing the accuracy of real time clocks.
2. Description of Related Art
Real time clocks (RTCs) are used in many electronic products such as personal computers, mobile phones, and computer servers. The accuracy of the real time clock is important to high performance requirements of the electronic products such as the computer servers. For this reason, it is common to test the accuracy of the real time clocks configured in such electronic products.
There are two methods to test the accuracy of the real time clock configured in a motherboard of a computer server on a product line. The first ways is as follows: an operator corrects the time of the RTC to be tested according to a standard RTC, calculates a time difference between the current time of the tested RTC and the standard RTC at a specified interval, and judges whether the time difference is less than an acceptable margin. If the time difference is less than the acceptable margin, the quality of the tested RTC is regarded as good. However, this kind of method may cause low efficiency and errors. Because there are only two records of time (i.e., at the beginning and the end), if the time difference is more than the acceptable margin between the beginning and the end, this kind of method does not detect the error. The quality of the tested RTC is regarded as good if the time difference is less than the acceptable margin at the end.
The second ways is as follows: reading time of a standard RTC from a sever via an application software through a network, reading time of a tested RTC in the motherboard of a computer server via the application software, and calculating a time difference between the read time of the tested RTC and the standard RTC. However, if the connection between the server and the network is intermitted or delayed, the accuracy of the test result will decline.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for automatically testing the accuracy of real time clocks.